May 10, 2007

Credibility: Bloggers > MSM

Another baseball announcer caught making stuff up. From Aaron Gleeman:
During Saturday afternoon's game against Boston, FSN showed highlights of the Red Sox hitting back-to-back-to-back-to-back homers off Yankees starter Chase Wright earlier this season. Once the clip ended, play-by-play man Dick Bremer immediately began telling a story about how the Twins also hit four straight homers back in 1964. Thanks to the miracle of TiVo, here's an exact, word-for-word transcript of what Bremer said ...

That's a fascinating story and Bremer told it very well, but unfortunately it's apocryphal. ... the climax is an outright lie. ... It's amazing that [Bremer] has somehow remembered the events so wrongly given that he supposedly was at the game in question while working for the Twins. Beyond that, not only has he apparently been telling a fictionalized version of the story to people, Bremer was perfectly willing to relay it to what is a relatively substantial television audience without so much as checking the tale's most basic elements, all while doing his very best to play up the story's made-up drama.

The whole thing struck me as too good to be true when Bremer said it Saturday and within about 30 seconds my suspicions were effortlessly confirmed via multiple sources. Setting aside [Bremer]'s faulty memory, it's a shame that Bremer and FSN couldn't have taken the same amount of time that I did to confirm his story before passing it off as reality. Then again, I suppose not everyone can be expected to have the same sort of credibility as a blogger.

1 comment:

Jere said...

Isn't there a chance he meant Battey hit one 2/3rds of the way up the wall in foul territory before striking out? Someone should ask the guy...

Battey himself died a few years ago, though.